ACE Virtual introduces 27 educational webinars covering topics ranging from PDGM, COVID-19, Staff Retention, IT Security and more!
Although it is a chaotic time, and personal energy probably barely exists outside of work – we know that we must continue to offer opportunities for all to stay educated as we adjust to the “new normal”.
The sessions in this new virtual conference have been made available in a recorded format with the option for members to purchase as individual sessions, packages of 5 (based on tracks), or the full series. Thanks to sponsors, you will also be given the opportunity to receive significant discounts on products (up to 50% off!)!
If a staff member that is in the position of Director or higher agrees to have one-on-one phone calls with our Premium Sponsors you earn significant discounts!
Use the following codes: 3 Sponsor Calls: 30% OFF – ACE30 5 Sponsor Calls: 50% OFF – ACE50
2019 Private Care Management Conference Agenda Announced!
Labor Management Relations, Robert Brooks, Labor & Employment Partner, Verrill Dana Learn strategies to develop an effective plan of action when dealing with the current labor laws. This session will review recent and ongoing developments relating to handling your employees; such as, hiring, firing, discipline, and payment of wages. Additionally, hear more on the new Massachusetts Home Care Worker Registry Act and how it impacts your organization.
Recruiting, Onboarding & Educating the Caregiver Workforce of the Future,Helen Adeosun, EdM, Co-Founder & CEO of CareAcademy Educating caregivers is the number one health intervention for today’s home care agency. Learn staffing best practices to help find new caregivers and educate existing caregivers to meet the growing needs of clients in their care. Attendees will learn several actionable steps that agency owners and management can take today to ensure that their caregivers have the knowledge they need that a structured training program can offer, and the positive impact for retention, home care ROI and business.
Preventing Verbal Abuse of Workers: The Safe Home Care Project,Margaret M. Quinn, ScD, CIH, Professor and Director, Safe Home Care Project, Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences, UMass Lowell Previous studies have found that violent behaviors, including verbal abuse as well as physical assault, by patients towards health care workers is common and leads to injuries, illness, burnout and job turnover. The Safe Home Care Project team conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 Massachusetts home care aides and found that about 1 in 4 experienced verbal abuse from clients within the past year. The study identified home care conditions under which verbal abuse was most likely to occur and recommendations for prevention that can improve safety for both aides and their clients.
Key Metrics to Motivate Staff, Improve Retention and Promote Growth, Kunu Kaushal, Senior Solutions Home Care Learn from the Senior Solutions Home Care founder and CEO Kunu Kaushal who grew his Tennessee-based home care business from zero to $18+ million in nine years, with 800+ clients and 10 locations. The first session will share actual usable metrics, and formulas to help operate your agency at peak performance. Areas covered will include financials, operations, staffing, and recruitment. Move beyond revenue metrics to incentivize staff and provide more clarity around roles related to scheduling, recruitment and human resources. This simple, budget-driven model uses national metrics and KPIs that consider salaries and profitability for setting goals, defining responsibilities and motivating your staff.
Building Your Leadership Team, Kunu Kaushal, Senior Solutions Home Care In the second session you will learn his culture “secrets”, what makes a company’s culture great, how employee engagement can impact that culture. Kunu will share how he managed to build an attractive work culture, recognize when it’s time to let someone go, how to manage accountability, and more. Additionally, Learn how a great leadership team is built, including how to identify when it’s time to add to the team, ways to divide roles in order to maximize the team’s efficiency and key skill sets to identify when hiring.
Minute Women Home Care’s Ryan McEniff joins us to talk about the challenges of running a private home care agency in today’s economy and how families can ensure they get the best care.
Ryan McEniff
How did a “big, six-foot-six, burly guy” become the owner of Minute Women Home Care? For the seventh episode of the Talking Home Care podcast, Pat Kelleher talks with Ryan McEniff about what it takes to run a successful private home care agency. Topics include:
Ryan’s personal story about entering the industry;
The challenges (and opportunities) of transitioning from family to paid home care;
How home care can restore clients’ work/life balance;
Whether home care can remain affordable to middle-class families in a bustling economy;
Why finding (and keeping) the best staff is sometimes a bigger challenge than attracting clients;
Going the extra mile to protect clients with national background checks;
The single most important question all families should ask when choosing an agency for their loved ones (jump ahead to 34’35” to find out); and
You may listen to the podcast by clicking the play button above, downloading it directly, or subscribing through iTunes or Google Play. (Length: 37 minutes; Size: 18 MB). If you enjoyed it, please give us a five-star review so others can find it as well.
Guest: Ryan McEniff has been the owner of Minute Women Home Care since 2013. He became passionate about home care when his mother needed care while battling cancer. He is also a Certified Dementia Practitioner and the host of The Caregiver’s Toolbox podcast.
Now in its 12th edition, the Guides to Private Home Care Services have connected tens of thousands of families with the home care agencies that can help them care for their families and loved ones.
Need a primer on what home care can do? Don’t know how to pay for it? Don’t know how to select an agency, whom to trust, or what agencies are available in your are? This free directory answers all of your questions.
Click the images above to order.
Screenshots from the directories.
Looking for something more comprehensive? the Resource Directory is intended for professionals and others who make regular referrals to home care, the Private Care Guides are designed for consumers and are always available at no charge.
There is something for everyone at the 2018 New England Home Care & Hospice Conference and Trade Show. See below just some of the topics that may be suited for you!
Clinical Directors
Stop Sepsis at Home:Learn from the Home Care Association of NY on how to equip your clinicians with educational/preventative, screening and follow-up tools to combat sepsis.
CoP Compliance:Discuss which key performance indicators have the most impact on quality and client outcomes.
Developing and Maintaining a Wound Care Program:Learn about the operational and clinical aspects of creating and/or maintaining your wound care program. Hear real agency examples of using best practices and guidelines and much more!
Emergency Preparedness Table Top: Join your peers to take part in a realistic table top simulation.
Quality
Communicating with CMS:Get a primer into the new patient-centered language of CMS
Metrics for CoP Compliance:Discuss which key performance indicators have the most impact on quality and client outcomes
Optimizing Operations Through Data Collection and Dissemination:Examine the changing healthcare landscape and focus on making operational decisions based on data.
Private Duty
How the Age-Friendly Communities Movement Builds Partnerships:Hear local examples of how home care agencies can be involved in the movement to create “Age-Friendly Communities”
The Patient Experience:Learn strategies, action items, and tools to enable your agency to achieve improved patient experience while managing all other operational demands.
Problem Solving for Clients with Dementia:Learn how to engage direct care staff in active observation of the client, gather information, investigate and examine behaviors, and strategic problem solving.
CEO
We have carved out an entire CEO track for you to enhance your skills and knowledge as well as engage with panelists, and peers.
Employee Recruitment and Retention:Hear successful and unsuccessful strategies to attract and retain top-tier talent.
Population Health:Gain the knowledge base you need to make decisions for the population you serve.
Home Health Groupings Model (HHGM):Learn from experts on how the final prospective payment system promises to offer the industry direction what what it means for agency strategy and capability heading into 2019.
Therapy
Embracing Our Physical Therapy and Occupational Scope of Practice in Home Care:This session will explore how therapy in the home has evolved and expanded and how this impacts you, your patients and your agency.
Human Resources
Employment Law:Examine how various employment laws apply to the home care workforce and understand how to make sure your agency follows these laws and integrates in practice and your employee handbook.
Employee Retention: Learn specific approaches on how an agency can better engage the highest performers while still holding the lowest performers accountable and analyze the changing staff dynamics.
Engaging the Millennial Workforce:Hear how engaging the growing millennial workforce and understanding their mindset and motivation will be key for your agency in defining duties, assessing skill sets and identifying team leaders.
Finance
CFO Panel:Address management concerns, discuss operating efficiencies and internal financial controls and performance indicators.
How Population Health and Telemedicine Affect the Bottom Line:Learn how telehealth will show advancement in terms of improved patient satisfaction, increased patient census, reduced cost of care, and decreased nursing visits.
Hospice & Palliative Care
Creating a Pediatric Palliative Care Program:Learn about the interface and collaboration between home care and hospital programs as well as the use of the National Consensus Project to guide current and future program development.
The Patient Experience:Learn strategies, action items, and tools to enable your agency to achieve improved patient experience while managing all other operational demands.
Ethics of Patient Choice and Aid-In Dying:Discuss how death with dignity/ aid-in-dying laws present new and evolving ethical and legal challenges for agencies in the states where it is legal, or where legislation is pending.
There are even more break-out sessions to learn from and 5 keynotes not even mentioned! Be sure to take a look at the full brochure to learn about ALL sessions being offered at this years conference!
Pat Kelleher and HouseWorks’s Andrea Cohen discuss the challenges facing private duty home care agencies.
Andrea Cohen
The Talking Home Care podcast returns after a summer hiatus. In this third episode, Pat Kelleher talks with Andrea Cohen, co-founder and CEO of HouseWorks, one of the largest and most successful private care home care agencies in Massachusetts. Topics include:
A primer on private care home care (what it is, who it serves, what it offers, is it affordable, etc.);
How private care agencies earn their clients’ trust;
How technology empowers agencies and families alike;
What private care agencies are doing to overcome workforce challenges; and
What the future holds for the industry in the post-Baby Boom years.
You may directly download the podcast here (Length: 27’54”; Size: 13 MB).
Guest: As the co-founder and CEO of HouseWorks, Andrea Cohen’s vision crystalized over 20 years ago when she took care of both of her parents. HouseWorks’s fundamental innovation has been an entrepreneurial approach to service delivery that returns a sense of control to adult children and their parents.
Don’t want to miss the next episode of Talking Home Care? Subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, or enter the following in your podcast app:
The roughly $40 billion that will make up the legislature’s FY17 proposal must first go through a six-member “conference committee” that will negotiate on differences between the House and Senate budget versions.
Included in the Senate version was a special commission that will study, discuss, and make recommendations on separate policies for state-based oversight of home health and private-pay home care agencies. It will take advocacy to ensure that this important provision is included in the conference committee’s negotiated budget, and action can be taken through the HCA’s Advocacy Center.
Simply fill out the contact forms and hit “send” to help gain support for the Home Care Commission!
The Commonwealth is one of five states without either licensure or a “certificate of need” process for home health care services. Massachusetts has also recently experienced rapid growth in the number of “certified” home health agencies. The related and significant spike in MassHealth spending has forced the state to establish program integrity measures on these agencies.
Likewise, private-pay home care agencies across the state that provide mostly non-medical support services in the home have no state oversight and a study commission is needed to determine the best solution.
The Alliance will continue to update it’s members on this proposal.
In a $39.5 billion budget, the Senate advanced Home Care Alliance priorities, namely a special commission that will study and make recommendations for state oversight of home care.
The commission would create a separate set of recommendations for certified home health and also private pay agencies. The group would include three representatives from each type of agency (certified and private-pay) as part of the membership along with policymakers, administration officials, and many others. During the Senate’s deliberations on more than 1,300 amendments, the Massachusetts Nurses Association and the MA Chapter of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.
Unfortunately, efforts to gain payment increases for home health aides and homemakers were not approved despite collaboration with the Home Care Aide Council, Mass Home Care, and several dedicated Senate offices. Senator Joan Lovely (D-Salem) spoke well in debate on behalf of a home health payment review and Senator Barbara L’Italien (D-Andover) fought for inclusion of home health aide payment, in particular. Senator Patricia Jehlen (D-Somerville) and Senator Sal DiDomenico (D-Everett) also helped lead an effort to advance home care rates.
On a positive note,an amendment was defeated that would have created a publicly-available registry of home care workers that aimed to list private information.
In addition, the Senate approved a pilot program of just over $1 million that expands income eligibility standards for services coordinated through Aging Service Access Points.
Other notable items in the Senate’s budget include the following:
A feasibility study on allowing spouses to be paid caregivers under MassHealth.
Allowing a leave of absence for nursing home residents under MassHealth (20 medical leave days and 10 non-medical leave days).
A fund created from fines and penalties relative to patient abuse in nursing homes that funds the prevention of such action through staff training and education, enhanced inspections, and relocating residents to other facilities.
$20.5 million for the Nursing Home Quality Jobs Initiative as part of SNF Supplemental Rates.
$200,000 for Geriatric Mental Health Services.
The HCA thanks its members for the hundreds of emails and phone calls to Senators during the past two weeks. The state budget process moves on to a conference committee process where the House and Senate negotiate differences between their two FY17 proposals. The Alliance will continue to push for the commission to establish oversight measures as well as other items to strengthen home care.
The Home Care Alliance is hosting two great conferences in the next coming weeks. Check out the information below to learn more about next weeks Private Care Conference and the Financial Conference being held on December 1st.
The 2015 Private Care Conference is just a little over a week out but it is not too late to register! Come out to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA on Thursday, November 19th to listen to a stellar line-up of speakers.
Topics to be covered include:
Recruitment & Retention with Maggie Keen of myCNAjobs.com
Advocacy with HCA’s own James Fuccione
Sales & Marketing with Merrily Orsini of CoreCubed
Technology with Michael Radice of ChartaCloud
and Wage & Hour Compliance with Anita Maietta of the AG’s Office
HCA is proud to announce the office agenda for the annual Financial Management Conference being held on December 1st at the Waltham Woods Conference Center in Waltham, MA. Value Based Purchasing … ACO Contracting … Post-Acute Transitions … Agency CEOs and CFOs face a rapidly-evolving financial environment that brings huge challenges. Gain tools and knowledge to help your agency succeed and thrive, from nationally-recognized expert speakers such as:
Teresa Lee of the Alliance for Home Health Quality & Innovation
Last December, the Massachusetts Department of Labor Standards (DLS), which is a division of the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development (EOLWD), finalized regulation that removes private pay home care agencies from the Employment Agency Regulation.
This change, while a welcomed clarification, has left private home care agencies without any state oversight, which means that anyone can open up an agency and can start accepting out-of-pocket payment for providing non-medical supportive services to individuals in their home.
Governor Charlie Baker’s administration has provided a unique opportunity to advocate for reasonable state oversight of private home care agencies. Specifically, they are seeking feedback on how to clarify and streamline Massachusetts regulations across the board via a special webpage called “A Clearer Code.”
The Home Care Alliance of Massachusetts is asking agencies, home care workers and advocates to take the following steps to help home care consumers gain the protection and peace of mind they deserve:
General Regulatory Themes: Select either Elders, Health Care, or Licensing & Permitting
Please list the Agency or Agencies affiliated with this regulation: Executive Office of Labor & Workforce, Executive Office of Elder Affairs, Office of Consumer Affairs & Business Regulation, Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
Describe the regulatory issue or observation: When this regulation was amended, it dropped state oversight of private-pay home agency services. There are now literally hundreds of private home care agencies operating unlicensed and unregulated. Massachusetts consumers, especially the elderly, deserve better.
Suggestions for easing regulatory compliance: We need the Governor to name a commission to study and make recommendations on private home care licensure standards as soon as possible. Home care agencies and the Home Care Alliance of Massachusetts needs to be at the table to determine the proper direction for quality services, ethical business practice and consumer protection for vulnerable seniors.
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